[bjelkeman-again]

I probably have made all of those mistakes at one time or another. Some of the mistakes where bad enough to nearly sink a company. Hopefully I make fewer of them now.

It is humbling to have a great team actually letting you manage them, especially when you mess up and the tell you and they let you learn from your mistakes.

When you have teams like that it is easy to manage. If you do, take really good care of your team. They are worth it.

[err4nt]

I have a hard time respecting the authority of people who are visibly fallible. It has led to me pursuing a working relationship where I'm a self-directed independent worker in more of a team where we each have our own corner to nibble away at and that has been working well.

Lately I have felt the desire within me to lead, or to create employment for others as I see so many of my peers selling themselves short, slaving away for terrible managers who have no idea what managing is.

I'm grateful to see you and others in this thread who approach management with a 'what can I do for these people' attitude. Do you have any advice for a young guy like me who one day wants to be one of the 'good managers' or hire people under me but has zero management experience so far?

I'm thinking it might be good for me to run workshops or hackathon projects or short-term commitments to limit my faults so if I make a mistake it's over soon and I can reflect on it and do better next time. Do you think a lot of short-term projects would be like management training speed-dating, or is there a better way to work on these skills?

[jevanish]

What kinds of things do you like to do to take really good care of them?

[bjelkeman-again]

It probably varies a bit from what type of organisation you are running.

Then, listen to people, understand where they are at, offer something which means that they develop personally. Make sure everyone is really clear on what you are trying to achieve and then give them the rains to lead and achieve that together. My product development teams have a very strong idea of where we are going with the products and they do 95% of their work without any input from me.

Again, listen to people. Attend meetings, not to control things but essentially keep your ear on the ground for issues or friction then resolve it quickly with the person in focus. Also I attend meetings to inform people on what is going on in the rest of the organisation.

We run a very open organisation, so we discuss budgets and how we approach things very openly. Open discussions about how we are expanding are important. One effect of this is that we have very little in the form of politics in the organisation.

A lot of this can sound like clichés, and it is, if you don't do it well and with people in your focus. The organisation we run is there to support a great group of people doing great things. Not the other way around.